On Thursday we started our journey from the beautiful lake shore in Cape Maclear. An hour on a pick-up truck, ~2 hours on a minivan (could the driver blast the music any louder!!?? I thought I'd lose my hearing ability forever), and ~6 hours on a bus to get to Blantyre, Malawi's largest city. The total distance was less than 400km, and the road was almost entirely paved. The reason for a 9-hour trip was that the minibuses and buses constantly stopped to pick up and drop off passengers. Patience is the mother of all virtues. To ease the pain, the first hour on the pick-up truck was a private hire. It came with a story. The truck looked brand new and Simon noted (to me) that the driver didn't drive very well. We learned that the driver didn't drive until this year. Last year-end there was a promotion from the cell phone company: buy a top-up card and you automatically participate in a draw with several prizes, a pick-up truck being the main one. And our guy from Cape Maclear village got the winning call, and received a brand new Toyota by January 2nd. He works like a taxi now, and given the state of the road to the cape, it is most convenient that he got a truck.
It was still daylight when we reached Blantyre, from where we thought it would be easiest (relatively) to find transportation to Mozambique. We started a late walking city tour, but it was cut short by heavy rain. And it kept raining. After dinner: still raining. It stopped only the following morning after breakfast, when we were about to leave.
From Blantyre the nearest Mozambican city with an airport is Tete. We thought it would be best to get there by road, and take a domestic flight from there to Mozambique's northern coast. We had 2 options to get from Blantyre to Tete. The cheap option was taking a minibus to the Malawi border post, changing to another minibus to the Mozambique border post, and then a final minibus from there to Tete. It was too complicated. We decided to choose a more expensive option. There are express buses from Blantyre to Joburg that speed through Tete; they are not allowed to drop any passengers before its final destination. However, we found a bus driver that was willing to stop and drop us in Tete, if we paid the full price to Joburg. And so we did. Don't worry, passports were stamped; we are legal visitors of Mozambique. The bus was modern, the ride + immigration took only 5 hours, and we were served lunch on board (chicken with fries, no utensils, no napkins). If the bus had had a working AC, the ride would have been divine.
We reached Tete around 2:30pm on Saturday, only to find that most hotels were full because that weekend the municipality was celebrating its golden anniversary. We finally found accommodation at Motel Tete, a little away from 'downtown', but right by the river. Very nice, it ended up being a perfect place to stay.
Tete was very lively on Saturday night. There was a free concert in the main gymnasium that was absolutely packed. Cars and bikes were constantly driving up and down the main drag. We even saw a 10-wheeler making rounds. Everybody looking their best, and enjoying the music pouring out from the concert. Lots of young people, lots of beer, party atmosphere. No touts. I was loving this unpretentious town.
We needed a flight to the coast on the local airline. But it was not that easy to buy one. First, we arrived on Saturday afternoon and the sales agency was closed until Monday. Second, there was no internet available in town to check if tickets could be bought online. Third, we called the airline's reservation number, but it was useless. The last resort was to go to the airport on Sunday and try to get on the first and only flight out.
On Sunday morning we packed, carried our bags back to downtown, and got on a minivan that dropped us at the airport. Side comment: it is impressive how many people a minivan can carry. Before arriving to Africa, I would have said the maximum was 10, on Sunday we proved that you can fit 25 and a couple of big bags. Eventually, we arrived at the airport before the airline people. There was only one flight out of Tete that afternoon, and it was full. We put our names down on the wait list (rethorically; there wasn't a list since we were the only ones without a ticket) and sat down with our fingers crossed.
It was a beautiful day: sunshine, blue sky, super hot (they say this is the hottest place in Mozambique). It was not so bad to be sitting inside the cooler airport building. Everybody that came into town for the 50th anniversary was taking this flight out. Everybody looking hip&cool and not like Tete locals at all. We saw the journalist that was on TV that night reporting from Tete. We saw the flashy big guy with the two skinny girls with matching handbags. Big guy was wearing white shoes, white pants, white frame sunglasses, white and orange t-shirt, but, oh no, black socks and black underwear. I think the latter must have been a mistake, maybe he didn't pack well for his day trip. Without doubt, he was a performer on Saturday night. Finally, all the jet set people checked in, and we were left with no seats available. Superb people-watching, though.
After the plane left, the airline lady issued tickets for the following morning. We were not looking forward to taking the minivan back into town again. We must have looked in bad shape, because when I asked the airline lady for a ride back to town in the airline's minivan, they took us all the way to Motel Tete's door, even though it was not on their way. They also gave us a ride back to the airport the following morning. Nice people, merciful to the distressed travelers. Well, spending the rest of Sunday reading and playing sudoku by the river was not particularly distressing.
On Monday we managed to fly out of Tete into Nampula making only 3 connections. Yeah, we wanted to survey every airport in the country. To my surprise, all of our 4 flights were on time. Wonderful. We arrived in Nampula at night: dinner, shower, sleep.
Tuesday found us in a taxi to Ilha de Mozambique, right on the coast. We had contracted the taxi driver that gave us the ride from the airport to the hotel, but his car was in such bad shape that he subcontracted to another driver with a newer vehicle. We arrived to Ilha by midday, 4.5 days after we set off from Cape Maclear. Feels good to have arrived.
Mercedes
No comments:
Post a Comment